On Valentine's Day, it's quite common for couples to exchange flowers, candy, kisses or warm embraces on city streets. The day, after all, symbolizes love.
But is there an age limit to romantic love?
The mass media would lead us to believe that this is the case, given that young couples are often the focal point of most marketing campaigns and TV series.
So what about older couples? Does love fade after a certain point?
According to Dr. Norm O'Rourke, the opposite may be true: love may help sustain people in their later years.
Dr. O'Rourke is a clinical psychologist and assistant professor with the Department of Gerontology at Simon Fraser University. In October 2005, he received both a CIHR New Investigator award and the CIHR Institute of Aging's Recognition Prize for Aging Research. His work is supported largely by funding from CIHR and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.
Dr. O'Rourke is currently investigating why a phenomenon he has labelled 'marital aggrandizement' can have significant physical and mental health benefits for older married people. According to Dr. O'Rourke, this is a state of mind where one holds an unrealistically inflated or exaggerated sense of how good the relationship has been; that the couple has experienced no problems in their many years of marriage.
In 1996, Dr. O'Rourke and his colleagues recognized this phenomenon while they studied depression among spouses of persons with dementia.
Despite caring for loved ones under stressful conditions, he discovered that certain caregivers appeared to be functioning with no difficulty at all. Often, these spouses had only positive things to say about their loved ones; and recalled only wonderful things about their married lives before their spouses became ill.
This prompted Dr. O'Rourke to ask crucial questions: "How is it possible for married people not to remember negative memories about their spouses and relationships? And is it possible that this tendency to idealize affects their physical and mental well-being?"
With the aid of a measurement scale that he and Dr. Philippe Cappeliez from the University of Ottawa developed in 2002, Dr. O'Rourke is able to identify those who look at their married lives in highly idealized ways. It appears that this tendency sustains people by buffering them from the negative effects of life's ups and downs.
In his research, Dr. O'Rourke has also discovered that this tendency to idealize is not necessarily contagious. In other words, it is not uncommon for one spouse to recall only fond memories of their married lives, while the other looks at the marriage from a more balanced perspective. And this isn't gender specific.
"Dr. O'Rourke's research on later life relationships will be an important contribution to the social psychology of health and aging, through its examination of the role of aggrandizement," notes Dr. Anne Martin-Matthews, Scientific Director of the CIHR Institute of Aging. "It will also have practical application in our understanding of complex relationship issues and dynamics as they relate to health in old age."
As part of his three-year CIHR-funded study, Dr. O'Rourke has taken this research into the lab in an attempt to better understand how couples in long-term marriages interact and resolve their disagreements. He is in the process of recruiting 125 couples, over the age of 49 who have been married at least 20 years.
The Process:
Dr. O'Rourke and his graduate students first find a common point of disagreement within couples (financial issues are most common). His lab has been set up to resemble a comfortable living room atmosphere in which couples are asked to discuss various ways they might resolve their issues.
Video recordings enable him to study facial expressions, body language in addition to what they say to each other. Dr. O'Rourke also obtains multiple cortisol samples to measure stress levels using saliva samples provided by the couples. If cortisol levels spike over the course of the discussion and remain high, then he knows that stress levels have increased significantly.
The Results:
So far, Dr. O'Rourke has noticed that among those where one or both partners idealize their married lives, they don't fight as much as they discuss.
"They have more constructive methods of approaching their problems. They talk about a disputed issue in a calm and rational manner and listen attentively to the other person's perspective," says Dr. O'Rourke.
It is assumed that within these couples, cortisol levels remain relatively low - and so does the stress.
This is an important finding, because high cortisol levels are significantly associated with illnesses such as heart disease.
This is just the beginning for Dr. O'Rourke and his team in their attempts to understand the phenomenon of marital aggrandizement. They intend to follow couples over time in order to see how their health may change and what factors predict these changes.
Dr. O'Rourke also hopes to identify how these factors help sustain the mental and physical health of older adults over time.
True love and health - that's something else to think about on Valentine's Day
